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Faculty

Deborah Lutz

Description

Dr. Deborah Lutz has published widely on the Brontës, material culture, Victorian eroticism, pornography, death culture, and collecting. She is at work on her fourth book, and her writing has appeared in numerous journals and collections, including Novel:A Forum on Fiction; Victorian Literature and Culture; The Oxford History of the Novel in English, and Cabinet. She has been interviewed by the New York Times, Salon, New York Post, Dublin’s News Talk Radio, The John Batchelor Radio Show, and The History Channel.

Her newest book, tentatively entitled The Brontë Cabinet and due to be published in 2015 by W. W. Norton, takes an artifact that belonged to the Brontës—hair jewelry, desk boxes, walking sticks, needlework, letters and more—as the focal point for each chapter. Using precise biographical facts relating to the objects and their place in the Brontës’ writing, this book investigates the cultural history they illuminate. What results is an account of women’s work in the home (including the labor of writing) and of close, collaborative relations between women.

Her third book, supported by an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2015. Relics of Death in Victorian Literature and Culture analyzes the collecting and revering of the artifacts and personal effects of the dead as affirmations that objects held memories and told stories. The love of these keepsakes in the 19th century speaks of an intimacy with the body and death, a way of understanding absence through its materials, almost lost to us today. But more importantly, these practices show a belief in keeping death vitally intertwined with life — not as generalized memento mori but rather as respecting the singularity of unique beings whose loss needed to be always remembered.

Her second book, Pleasure Bound: Victorian Sex Rebels and the New Eroticism (Norton, 2011), dives into 1860s and ‘70s London and the political freethinking and gender play of two intertwined bohemian groups — the Cannibal Club headed by Sir Richard Francis Burton and the Aesthetic Pre-Raphaelites with D. G. Rossetti as leader. An interdisciplinary project, this book considers the collaborative work of poets, painters, designers, politicians, and scientists and their impact on the nascent feminist movement and the just-developing awareness of sexual identity rights. Her first book ­—The Dangerous Lover: Gothic Villains, Byronism, and the Nineteenth-Century Seduction Narrative (Ohio State UP, 2006) — traces a literary history of characters whose eroticism comes from their dark past and rebellious exile from the comforts of everyday living.

Honors/Awards

Recipient, American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship (2010-2011)